David is 27 years old, fresh out of Yale Med. With his grades, he could've had any residency he wanted. His father pushed him toward cardiothoracic surgery, but money wasn't what David cared about. He settled on family medicine after a wonderful volunteer experience in Mexico.

"It's my calling," he told his date a few minutes ago. "For as long as I can remember I've wanted to be a family doctor. I do it for the patients."

His date's dress is tasteful and in-style. You don't know it, but she spent most of her morning at her desk, deciding whether she should wear statement earrings or a statement necklace. She spies some lawyer bitch wearing the same necklace she was planning to wear, and is thankful she chose the earrings.

"You just have to find your calling," she says. "That's what's important." She brushes her hair back over her ear. Her name is Meegan.

That lawyer bitch -- Katheryn -- is talking to a black woman with an untidy afro named Malany, who is grimacing and not saying much. Katheryn shifts a little bit and keeps talking about Donald Trump. A few seconds pass. The PoC is still silent. She feels bile rising in her throat. Did she say something?

In a display of allyship that she will blog about later, she stops talking.

At the shrimp table, a gorgeous brunette is chatting up a guy who works at a Doctors Without Borders call center. He studied anthropology, and wrote articles for the school newspaper on who is, and who is not sexist. He opened the conversation by saying that he works for "Médecins Sans Frontières," or MSF for short.

She takes another shrimp and says, "It's just that, like, it's not okay to say that all lives matter, when everyone knows that, except that there are specific injustices that only happen to black people, and those are what they're trying to fight."

He nods and laments that her dress isn't more revealing.

"Now that Trump is president I'm not sure what will happen," she finishes.

Across the room, in the darkest corner of the ball room, the people who hope that they're misfits are trying to stand out. Karly snorts at something she doesn't like. She wonders whether events like this would be allowed, if the world were exactly as she wanted it to be.

She hears the very end of the conversation next to her. "--because we're killing the planet."

Everyone is quiet. Mercifully, Karly realizes that she has a personal stake in this story.

She smiles and says, "Have you guys gotten into composting yet? I just started." She spent a semester at St Andrew's in the UK; she dropped the accent she "picked up", but still puts an upward inflection on every question she asks. Do you prefer keeping the compost in your gar-den?

You tell her that you haven't started yet, but you hear it's a really good thing. You have to be concerned about your carbon footprint now that Trump is in office.

You wonder why you ever thought about moving to the suburbs to raise kids. Everything is turning out exactly the way you wanted.